Kadina and The Giant Wallaroo Copper Mine: In the Yorke Peninsula region of South Australia
The century-old clock tower donated by a blacksmith, Daniel Squibb, sets off a fine institutional town centrepiece. Kadina Town Hall is an adornment to the unofficial capital of Yorke Peninsula. It has grown to become a regional farming, administrative and tourist centre, but Kadina was originally laid out to serve a great copper mine that would bring thousands of miners and their families all the way from Cornwall.
Thirty years ago, the Cornish Festival was born, celebrating the heritage they brought to what became known as little Cornwall. Today, visitors head for the Copper Coast, with Kadina about an hour and a half drive from Gepps Cross (in Adelaide’s northern suburbs).
The mine on the edge of town is no longer bare, with native regrowth taking it back to the look of the old Wallaroo Sheep Run. The name is based on aboriginal words for wallaby wee, so they say, but when a shepherd spotted some green rocks among the white limestone in 1859, it quickly came to mean a massive copper mine. Harvey’s Engine house is the last soaring sentinel above the line of lode that ran for more than 500 metres. Author and historian, Keith Bailey, took us back in time as he explained how deep the ore body went.
“If they started work at half-past-seven, it took an hour to climb down 1000 feet, so they would need to get to the top of the shaft by half-past-six”.
His Cornish grandfather was down the mine as mechanisation saw one of the shafts reach 3000 ft (914m), and the Wallaroo mine employ as many as 2000 men and pickey boys, who hand sorted the ore on the surface. The company sent agents to traditional English mining country to lure them.
“They were the best hard rock miners in the world”, Keith said. “They used to say whenever you found a hole, there’d be a Cornishman at the bottom of it”.
Giant 24-hours-per-day steam-driven pumps in engine houses like the Harvey hollow relic kept the underground water at bay. It has filled the shaft here to within 6 metres of the top, and the surface boils with a constant stream of bubbles from deep below. It is a trifle on the nose, too.
“That pong is hydrogen sulphide, or rotten egg gas”, smiled our tour guide. “There is a lot of sulphur down the mine, and it is being produced all the time.”
Many of the miners lived in humble cottages (that still stand, straggling along Kadina’s edge), while the former sea-captain-pastoralist-turned-mine-owner Walter Watson Hughes amassed a fortune. His initials stood out on the smelter chimney at Port Wallaroo a few kilometres away, and his statue sits on North Terrace in front of the University of Adelaide which he handsomely endowed. Before they closed in 1923, the amalgamated Moonta and Wallaroo mines had produced twenty million pounds worth of copper.
Behind the new Kadina Visitor Centre on the Moonta Road is a real survivor of that fantastic era. With its shingle-roof and pickaxe beer bottle garden borders and cottage garden, Matta House is now a picturesque and quiet insight into domestic life of the late nineteenth century. It was built for the mine manager of the Matta Matta mine, close to the main orebody. After a decade, the big company next door absorbed it. Visitors find themselves walking into a beautifully kept family home, and, because original Cornish mining families donated many of the items of furniture, ornaments and homeward, this is a real heirloom collection. This National Trust property is open every day as part of the National Dryland Farming Interpretive Centre.
The town laid out to serve the fabulously successful mine became very substantial in its own right, and it boasts an hour-long heritage walking tour to prove it. It includes the Royal Exchange Hotel, with its long cast-iron lace upstairs verandah and coat of arms high above its corner doors. It was built in time to welcome the famous English cricketer, W. G. Grace, and his touring team in the 1870s, and not long after, the future King George IV came for dinner after a visit to the mine.
As historian Keith Bailey pointed out in the main street, the mine story comes right into town.
“The two-storey Kadina Hotel started out as the single level Miners Arms,” he noted before pointing out an oddly named establishment that celebrates the start of it all. “The Wombat Hotel was originally a boarding house for new miners. It was named after the animal that dug up the first pile of ore of the Wallaroo mines”.
Out of a wombat burrow came a town with a proud heritage that includes a butcher’s shop that has traded continuously since 1861. The substantial Catholic Church in Kadina even has Wallaroo mine history built in. The limestone blocks came from the old Elder shaft engine house.
With a couple of bakeries serving the traditional fare, Kadina was surely the place to check why the Cornish pastie has a raised curl of pastry from one end to the other. They confirmed it was a “handle” for a hungry miner to grab with a dirty hand for a subterranean lunch. He would eat the meat and veg pastry packet, leaving a nice jam “dessert” at one end till last before he threw the pastry curl away. Try the technique during a picnic in Victoria Square, where the quaint band rotunda again stands as a monument to the Wallaroo mine. Its commemorative stone was unveiled by the legendary mine manager, Captain Henry Hancock.
Over six months, the mine helped save South Australia’s economy, gave us a continuing Cornish tradition, and gave rise to a country town with an attractive heritage - Kadina.
Saturday 16 May 2003 is Kadina’s big day in the biennial Cornish Festival, with a “furry dance” procession and Village Green Fair. The popular Cavalcade of classic cars and motorcycles weaves through the region from Wallaroo on Sunday 17th, and Moonta holds its traditional Cornish Fair on the Monday holiday. “Kernewek Lowender” means Cornish happiness, and there will be plenty of it about during the Cornish Festival.
Details:
Kernewek Lowender Cornish Festival
May 12 - 19, 2003
Kadina - Moonta- WallarooYorke Peninsula Regional Visitor Information Centre
Moonta Rd
Kadina, South Australia, 5554
Ph: 1800 654 991Web: www.kernewek.org
Web: www.yorkepeninsula.com.au
Recommended books:
The Wallaroo Mine - Keith Bailey
Kadina. A Second Look - Keith Bailey
Discovering Historic Kadina - G.Drew
